uptown express

The day before my graduation, it poured. My family was visiting, and SoHo was no fun soaking wet, so we scuttled through the rain and into a cab headed uptown to my apartment. There, we’d make lunch, play monopoly, wait out the rain. I sat shotgun and talked life and religion with the driver. His dad had been the head of Pepsi in Afghanistan, and though he now laments having to “work for a living,” he still manages to travel broadly, make short documentaries, and live well. Our conversation started when he asked about the price of a flight to Portugal. I only visit every five years or so, I said, because it’s so expensive. He made this sound halfway between a pa-shaw and a tsk and shook his head. I visit Kabul every year, he said, and have traveled through all of Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Europe and Africa in the past decade. People live pretty much the same everywhere, he said. We’re all concerned with the same basic things: health, family, getting through another day. Life is “like going to the airport. Either you take the train, or a car, or you walk. Doesn’t matter how you go, you still gotta get there.”